CO356 - Sport Media - Meister: Injuries

Both ESPN investigative reporters, the authors reveal how the NFL, over a period of nearly two decades, sought to cover up and deny mounting evidence of the connection between football and brain damage.

For far too long, the menace of concussions has been hidden in plain sight. On playing fields across America, lives are being derailed by seemingly innocuous jolts to the head. From the peewees to the pros, concussions are reaching epidemic proportions. This book brings that hidden epidemic and its consequences out of the shadows. As frightening as the numbers are—estimates of sports-related concussions range from 1.6 million to 3.8 million annually in the United States—they can’t begin to explain the profound impact of a hidden health problem that can strike any of us. It is becoming increasingly clear that concussions, like severe head traumas, can rob us of our memory, our mental abilities, our very sense of self. Because the damage caused by a concussion is rarely visible to the naked eye or even on a brain scan, no one knows how many millions might be living lives devastated by an invisible injury too often shrugged off as “just a bump on the head.”

"Chapters discuss the history of football injuries by decade (1931-40, 1941-50, etc.) and critically analyze important circumstances in football that have played a role in fatality and catastrophic football injuries (equipment, rules, coaching, medical care, etc.). Additional chapters cover the history of brain and spinal injuries and how the detection and treatment have changed during the past 75 years, as well as heart-related and heat stroke fatalities. A chapter also discusses the history of NOCSAE [National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment] and its effect on helmet standards and the reduction of football fatalities and catastrophic injuries."--From introduction p. 8.

The NFL insists players know they're playing a dangerous game, but players never see the deteriorated mental capacities of their former heroes.Throwaway Players is former Tampa Bay Buccaneers president Gay Culverhouse’s story of the broken bodies and lost souls of the men who have left the locker room and what remains after the cheering subsides. Focused on making money rather than the well-being of their players, this is the dark side of football the NFL doesn't want fans to see.

Warrior Girls exposes the downside of the women's sports revolution that has evolved since Title IX: an injury epidemic that is easily ignored because we worry that it will threaten our daughters' hard-won opportunities on the field. From teenage girls playing local soccer, basketball, lacrosse, volleyball, and other sports to women competing at the elite level, female athletes are suffering serious injuries at alarming rates. The numbers are frightening and irrefutable. Young female athletes tear their ACLs, the stabilizing ligament in the knee, at rates as high as eight times greater than their male counterparts. Women's collegiate soccer players suffer concussions at the same rate as college football players. From head to toe, female athletes suffer higher rates of injury, and many of them play through constant pain.